The Philanthropic Family

Photo from Organic Life

You may have heard about the Slow Food movement, a counter to our Fast Food culture. If you’re like me, you’ve been wanting to adopt eating habits that are more consistent with your values and good intentions but haven’t quite been able to give up the “everyday low prices” on Chilean grapes offered by big box grocery stores even in the dead of winter.

The Chicago Green Festival has inspired me to finally take some action. Here are six things you can do, too, and some resources to get started. I’ve put them generally in order from easiest to most time-consuming.

1. Find your local farmer’s market. My local farmer’s market seems to have more and more tupperware and knock-off handbags, but there are still plenty of farmers coming in from the surrounding area and bringing their freshest produce, along with vendors offering fresh pastries, artisan cheese and organic meats.  Click here to find a local farmer’s market near you (search by zip code). I don’t go to the farmer’s market looking for cheap deals, but if concern over your budget has been keeping you away, here are a few hints to save a bit: 1) try going near the end of the market when the farmer’s would rather sell for a little less than lug their produce back home; 2) make the farmer an offer and see what they’ll do for you. Today I had $14 left after picking up some peppers, asparagus and blueberries. The strawberries were going for $4.50 a container at a number of stands. I told the guy who usually offers bulk deals that I had $14 left, what could he give me for that amount? He gave me four containers, essentially buy three get one free. My darling husband turned most of the strawberries into seven jars of freezer jam that we’ll gobble up over the next month.
2. Pick your own produce. One way small farmers supplement their income is by hosting “pick your own” consumers, who often enjoy a hayride out to the field, the enjoyment of finding the perfect apple/strawberry/blueberry/apple/pumpkin, petting the farm animals and a lunch that usually involves hot dogs as well as farm-made treats like apple cider or muffins and pies. Click here to search for a Pick Your Own farm near you. Last year for Father’s Day I found a farm with Pick Your Own strawberries (can you see a pattern here?) and we filled up two huge baskets. The fruit is usually sold by weight, and you’re paying for the experience as well as the produce, but if you’ll eat it, can it, freeze it or share it, it’s still a good deal and a good time. Plus, your kids will get a kick out of seeing the farm and it’s a whole day of family entertainment.
3. Buy a season’s worth of produce from a local farmer. This concept is called “Community Supported Agriculture,” or CSA. The idea is that you find a farm nearby (click here for a great explanation of the concept and to search for a CSA near you) and sign up as a shareholder at the beginning of the season. Then each week your farmer will bring a box of whatever is ready to be picked. Usually the farm has a few local drop off sites.  I searched for a farm according to where they dropped off, and found one called Sweet Earth Organic Farm. I’m really looking forward to our first boxes in the next few weeks. The downside to this approach is that you pay for the whole season up front (in our case, $485). If you’re not comfortable with such a huge chunk of change, there are places like Irv & Shelly’s Fresh Picks that deliver weekly in the Chicago area, for more like $25 or $40 at a time with no season-long commitment.
4. Grow your own food. Since it’s mid-June, you can still plant some seeds directly in the ground, but you can also buy seedlings now from your local nursery. We actually started seeds growing in containers in our basement a few weeks ago and they are ready to plant in the ground. I like to think of this as our version of a Victory Garden for the current recession. This is our first year as gardeners, so we’ll see how it goes. But I’m told that kids enjoy watering and weeding “their” garden and are more likely to want to eat stuff they helped to grow.
5. Start a composting system (to feed that garden). So this is where most of my family thinks I have gone too far, but the truth is I get such a kick out of this that I’m showing it off to everyone. At the recent Chicago Green Festival, we bought an indoor composting system powered by worms. Yes, real live worms live in my kitchen, nestled down in a bed of newspaper scraps, cardboard, egg shells, coconut fibers and paper towels. Every few days my kids and I feed them a few hands full of kitchen scraps, including apple cores, the bits of broccoli I trimmed off and the tops of those thousands of strawberries we bought at the farmer’s market. Inside my clean, odorless bin, the worms are turning it into compost that will feed our garden in a few months. You can build these things yourself, or you can buy it like I did from Urban Worm Girl. She provides the whole set up and a great set of instructions.
6. Become an advocate at your kids’ school for serving healthy, local food.  This is the big commitment, I think. Most schools are just doing what’s easy, and what’s affordable, and what’s been arranged for them by the district or some other supervising force. But there are more companies working to make school lunches easy, affordable and healthy, while supporting their local farmers and the local environment. You may have heard of national leader Revolution Foods. Or here in Chicago there is Organic Life, which recently had a nice article in Crain’s Business about their efforts to improve the lunches in Chicago Public Schools, and Gourmet Gorilla. As soon as school is out (since I know the administrators are currently a bit pre-occupied with end of year craziness) I’m going to reach out to the head of the pre-school program and begin a conversation about switching from the current provider, whose menu includes some form of pizza every other day, to a local, organic food vendor. Gourmet Gorilla tells me they can do pre-school lunches for $3 (same price as now) and older kids for $4 or $4.50. I am pretty confident that other parents like me will be willing to pay a little more to help their kids eat healthier every day. And when the parents start pushing, schools respond.

I expect that eating local, fresh foods is more expensive in some cases (organic definitely costs more) and cheaper in others (buying what’s in season is cheaper and so is cooking instead of eating out). But even if my monthly grocery budget went from $600 to $700, I consider this $100/month an important part of using my consumer power to help bring about the world I want to see–one with a thriving local economy, healthier kids and a healthier me, less pesticides and other pollutants in the air and water, and more of a connection to where my food comes from. And I suspect that the message I’m sending to food companies with my choices each month will have a bigger impact on changing the world than a $100 donation to a charity working on the same issues.